Reinforce the IL Stronghold at NT | Expand Lightning Weakness

"Objection!" I hear one of you pipe up. "Mages don't need buffs, they need nerfs!"

Woah there, settle down sir. Let me expl-

"Preposterous! Paladins would be overtuned!" another one of you shouts.

Okay, kindly sit the fuck down and let me first give my sales pitch.

Preface


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Long ago, the two nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

Okay, I jest but only a little bit. But there was once a time when the IL and FP mages were at parity with another, with each having their own meaningful advantages.

In the "beginning", ILs could boss decently well in most of NT and they could also freeze mobs at 5-6, the ultimate end game grinding and leeching spot (and the greatest scourge this server has ever known), whereas FPs had a stronger ult which enabled them to reach tma thresholds about 6-7 levels earlier than their counterpart. FP single target was also stronger, but there was no place for that to really shine. At this point in time, ILs arguably had the upper hand because the stronger meteor was largely moot compared to the monk freezing benefit conferred upon by blizzard.

Flashforward two years later and PB is here, putting AMs truly on the bossing map for the first time. While IL had the ability to boss in NT before, they were still subpar attackers (except in nib) for mediocre content, which made this advantage over FP feel rather niche. But PB was truly relevant and impactful end game bossing where for the first time AMs not only had a real role but also dished out high damage. With FP single target finally being relevant and it also being stronger than that of IL, this new boss seemed to singlehandedly threaten the notion of ILs being the better bossers, leaving their ability to freeze monks as their only real defining characteristic over FPs.

Except that didn't last either after [REDACTED] had a hand in it. You see, what most people didn't know is that though he played an IL, [REDACTED] was actually batting for the other team. It's not a story that staff would tell you. It's a multimage legend. [REDACTED] was an FP sympathizer, so powerful and so wise he could use the Forums to influence balance changes. He concocted a 500 IQ big brain plan of selling two channels of 5-6 leech simultaneously with four ILs and regularly posting his pog earnings from it on the forums in an attempt to provoke staff into nerfing ILs, which eventually, of course, they did.

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Just two months after ILs lost their identity of being the better bosser, staff stripped ILs of the last significant advantage they had over FPs by making monks immune to freezing. But wait, there's more!

With ILs already curled up on the ground, they received another kick to the head a year later with the elemental resistance revamp. While it benefited ILs to a slight degree, it also eroded the niche NT base that ILs had. With the poison immunities lifted, FPs now overthrew ILs as the best pinner at dunas, leaving ILs with only nib and nameless left to inhale copium at.

With the accumulation of all these changes, the pros of actual import and relevance for each AM (that cannot be well substituted or replicated by another class) essentially boil down to the list below.

FP Pros:

• Reaches tma thresholds sooner for farming/grinding/leeching
  
• Higher damage on PB body
• Higher damage on mini beans
• Higher damage on Zak arms
• #1 Dunas pinner

IL Pros:

• King of Nibergen

So if you're seeing the same list as I am, we can all arrive at the same conclusion that there is currently no real reason to play an IL over an FP at present unless farming ele pierce is your bread and butter and favorite pastime (and you've got some Nightz777 TM luck).

"Okay, but ILs are still mages and mages are already very good so who cares," you insist.

I don't entirely disagree but the way I see it, lateral changes are important for class balance and it isn't healthy when one class is made entirely obsolete by another, as is evident by the situation with heroes, and I would just as much push for changes that further distinguish the hero and DK classes from another and even the archer classes for the same reason.

Suggestion
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Add lightning weakness to the following bosses:

• Verga Body 2
• Verga Body 3
• Dunas
• Royal Guard (soonTM)
• Munin
• Scarlion

The reason these bosses were selected is because they are all bosses where paladins are either already a dominant force in, i.e. they are already weak to fire and so will not benefit from an addition of lightning weakness, or where paladins are unable to really make good use of it. The one exception to this is Verga Body 3, where it currently has no weaknesses, but seeing as this last body only makes up ~23.3% of Verga's total HP paladin would only see about an overall 5% benefit across the entire fight, which doesn't really have any balance consequences especially given that paladins are already #1 there.

Verga Body 2, Munin and Scarlion are all bosses that are already weak to fire and so making them lightning weak does not further bolster paladin there.

Dunas presently does not have any weaknesses but even if it were weak to lightning, paladins would still be far from ideal there given the unfriendly nature of the fight towards non-ranged chars. With a right side pin, they would be missing a significant amount of hits as all of their attacks would be KBing Dunas, which shifts its hitbox, and with a left side pin they would have to play around frequent dispels, which would also significantly impact dpm. Furthermore, a right side pin is not as ideal for the use of a dispel mule and not being able to well control Dunas during DRs further complicates the use of a dispel mule.

As for the Royal Guards, they have an avoid of 100, which would require a paladin to have well over 300 accuracy for them to hit consistently.

The end result of these changes is that despite FPs keeping their crown at PB, ILs would partly reassert themselves as the better bosser in general between the two by primarily reinforcing their stronghold over at NT, all without marginalizing any other attackers. AMs were already a staple in Dunas and the optimal pinners so ILs reinheriting the throne from FPs is primarily a matter between the two mages. As for Verga, ILs are still at best slightly weaker than cleavers at bosses with lightning weakness (outside of nib and dunas) so they would still not be optimal attackers there. However, they would no longer be a liability and would be able to carry their weight. ILs would be #1 DPS at both nib and dunas, which feels niche enough so as to not feel like overextending, and be competent attackers at both Verga and Nameless, and in effect share the keys to the NT kingdom with paladins. They would also get the additional, albeit not as relevant, role of a scarlion pinner that does solid enough damage.

"Okay, but why the elemental weakness route?" you ask.

Balancing the two classes via elemental weaknesses was never an idea I was originally fond of and not one I chose to fall back on simply because it was the way it was before. I racked my head for alternative ways to balance ILs: reducing the damage decay on CL so they might be more competent CWK cleavers, nerfing blizzard damage and buffing CL damage to establish FPs as the de facto farming mage and ILs as the bossing mage, nerfing 5-6 and buffing oblivion so that ILs would be better end game grinders/farmers, and even undoing the monk freeze immunity that [REDACTED] had brought about. None of them felt as good and clean as elemental weakness changes, however, which don't require any additional tweaks to the AM kits themselves.

 

CL and Orb bouncing across HT is something that's been looked into before and I believe the conclusion was that it would be too difficult to implement, either due to overlapping hitbox constraints or the parts of HT being regarded as one entity. Even if CL could cleave there, however, with the current 50% damage decay it would be largely moot and they'd likely be better off ulting for most of the fight.

Making the arms strong against fire/ice is an interesting idea though and could make HT more inclusive towards AMs. But I also feel like if AMs were relevant in PB and HT, both of the big end game bosses, that'd be a bit of an overextension given their farming prowess. Would largely eliminate any cons for AMs.

 

I think your figures for Dunas might be a bit misleading. I believe you're comparing your Dunas dpm on sair with no pinner or dispel mule (correct me if I'm wrong) to dpms where Dunas is pinned and dispelled. Having a pinner makes an enormous difference as it turns the fight into free fire dpm (outside of DRs), as is evident by the fact that the dpm I posted on my MM with a pinner is nearly the same as yours without one when sair freefire outclasses MM by 20-25%. The def up buff from Dunas also reduces damage by roughly 20%.

If we extrapolate from our dpms at Nameless, another free fire boss, and factor in both a dispel mule and echo, I think you would have gotten over 8m. If we were to simply multiply Nightz' last posted dpm at Dunas by 1.5 to account for a hypothetical lightning weakness we would get 8.5m, which would be an overestimate as a few 100k from the initial dpm is derived from summon damage, but let's just ignore that on account of him still being 188 at the time. In this comparison, ILs would outperform sairs by ~5%, which is a far cry from 50%. And even if we just compare this theoretical IL dpm to my MM's dpm, the difference would be a bit over 30%, which while large is still a ways off from 50%, and would be closer to 25% when compared to an NL. A dunas solo with 8.5m dpm would take 27 minutes given its 230m HP; no IL would be getting close to sub 20 minute solos. That being said, even if it were quite profitable for them to solo Dunas, I think that that would be a rather moot point in the balance scheme of things given that AMs can already make more money doing other things.

Now if we look at Nib, which is a boss which would reflect a similar scenario given its lightning weakness and frequent weapon cancels, we would see that they already outperform all other classes by a margin of 20% or more, with the exception of sairs given the largely freefire nature of the fight. So why is it not considered problematic for IL to be "overtuned" at Nib? Probably because of how niche it is and how few people run it, I suppose, but that applies to Dunas as well. Sure, the fight also takes longer but the EV for Nib is also higher than that of Dunas.